MARTINA'S WORLD TRIP
MALAWI: June 27 - July 15, 2004
Your Dictionary
(Übersetzungshilfe)
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MARTINA'S WORLD TRIP MALAWI: June 27 - July 15, 2004 |
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Your Dictionary
(Übersetzungshilfe) |
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| Monday, July 5th, 2004 - Blantyre | ||||||||
| Today I spent the whole day in Blantyre, planning and preparing the next steps of my trip. I was determined to go diving at Lake Malawi, so next I was going to Cape Maclear, but afterwards I wanted to head straight to Zimbabwe for which I had to cross Mozambique. I needed to organise my visas and get more cash, plus I wanted to buy some pills at the pharmacy in order to prevent bilharzia, a nasty worm infection you can contract in the lake. Luckily, Doogles offered a visa service for Mozambique. I had to hand in my passport in the morning and would retrieve it, together with the Mozambique visa, in the afternoon. That was great, plus I found out that I could obtain the Zimbabwean visa at the border. Sweet. The only disadvantage was that without my passport, I couldn’t get any money. So I spent the day mainly at Doogles, doing laundry, using the computer and waiting for my passport. Speaking about laundry, the time had come that I got really fed up with wearing the same few clothes over and over again. Having lost underwear and a bra in Tanzania, one of my pants destroyed onboard of Tazara, plus another hole in a T-shirt that also happened on the train (I was running back to the compartment to grab my camera for a good shot out of the window and ripped my T-shirt on a door handle), my wardrobe was diminishing. I didn’t have much with me anyway and lots of pieces were dirty to an extend that manual laundry (the only one available at the places where I stayed) could not clean. I was craving for something else to wear, something normal, not to speak of something nice, instead of all these practical but not very attractive pieces. What would I have given for another pair of shoes, just some comfortable sneakers or regular everyday shoes! All the time the same shoes, the same pants, the same shirts... it was so annoying. Plus, I got equally fed up with my shower lotion and shampoo. I had bought this All-in-One soap which was supposedly “perfectly appropriate for skin, hair, laundry and dishes”. Well, yeah it was, but thanks to its all-round usage it also smelled very ... hm ... let’s say ‘neutral’ – and I was desperately longing to smell differently again someday!! When I finally retrieved my passport at 3:50 pm, Olly and Chris gave me a ride to the city centre but I was too late: the exchange bureaux had closed at 4 pm. Shit, this meant that I had to go back into town tomorrow morning although I had planned to catch an early minibus to start my trip to Lake Malawi. Emily had slightly changed her mind and was deviating from our original plan in the sense that she was going to get off the bus at Zomba before coming to the lake. Zomba was the country’s capital until the mid-1970s and remained famous for its vibrant market (the largest in Malawi), historical government buildings and impressive colonial estates. Zomba also has a mountain plateau and Emily wanted to spend another one or two days hiking. As much as I would have liked to visit the market of Zomba, my motivation for physical exercise in the mountains was pretty exhausted, plus I didn’t want to “waste” any more time but rather go directly to the lake. In the end, I got my bilharzia pills and some postcards before I returned to Doogles. |
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